Extracts

I discovered these extracts, again, last week. Full of soul, they are particularly meaningful to me at the moment. I want to read them, again and again, immersing myself in their beauty.

Haunted by ghosts, it is easy to become a ghost. Life ebbs. The pulse is too faint. Nothing stirs you. Some people approve of this and call it healing. It is not healing. A dead body feels no pain.

‘But pain is pointless’

            ‘Not always’

            ‘Then what is the use of suffering? Can you tell me that?’

She thinks I am holding on to pain. She thinks the pain is a souvenir. Perhaps she thinks that pain is the only way I can feel. As it is, the pain reminds me that my feelings are damaged. The pain doesn’t stop me loving – only a false healing could do that – the pain tells me that neither my receptors nor my transmitters are in perfect working order. The pain is not feeling, but it has become an instrument of feeling.

She said: ‘Do you still like having sex?’

            ‘You talk as though I’ve had an amputation.’

            ‘I think you have. I think someone has cut out your heart.’

I looked at her and my eyes were clear.

‘That’s not how the story ends.”

Stop.

There is always the danger of automatic writing. The danger of writing yourself towards an ending that need never be told. At a certain point the story gathers momentum. It convinces itself, and does its best to convince you, that the end in sight is the only possible outcome. There is a fatefulness and a loss of control that are somehow comforting. This was your script, but now it writes itself.

            Stop.

Break the narrative. Refuse all stories that have been told so far (because that is what momentum really is), and try to tell the story differently – in a different style, with different weights – and allow some air to those elements choked with centuries of use, and give some substance to the floating world.

Jeanette Winterson, The.PowerBook (2000)

The man stood up, and taking the book, began to walk down towards the sea. The storm sun poured down his shoulders in yellow rills.

            He held the light about him.

            The light fell out of the seamed sky in halos and cloaks. Squares and circles of light that dropped through the cut clouds and made single sense of all of the broken pieces of beach, cliff, man and boat. His past, his life, not fragments nor fragmented now, but a long curve of movement that he began to recognise.

Still the light. The light in a marvellous fabric, wrapping him, a quattrocento angel in unwoven cloth. At his hand, the spear-light unfewtered, his rod and staff that budded as he walked.

            He began to sing. He sang from the place that had been marked; the book, his body, his heart. The place where grief had been hid, not once but many times. His voice was strong and light. The sun was under his tongue. He was a man of infinite space.

From the cliff-head, the two women standing together, looked out. Or did they look in? Held in the frame of light, was not the world, nor its likeness, but a strange equivalence, where what was known was re-cast, and where what was unknown began to be revealed, and where what could not be known, kept its mystery but lost its terror.

            All this they saw and the sea in gold-leaf and the purple and pearl of the cliffs.

            It was not too late.

FIN.

Jeanette Winterson. Art & Lies (1994)

"Ignorance is not bliss"

This post is inspired by my colleague, Tom Tobia's, recent article in Design Week about how customer satisfaction can be improved by keeping people constantly informed about the service they are using or receiving, particularly the reasons why it might be temporarily substandard or seem illogical and frustrating.

Tom's article focusses on the strict controls that many budget airlines now have in place regarding hand luggage, for example why two small pieces of hand luggage are not allowed on board, even if they are smaller in total than a larger permitted piece. Without an adequate explanation, as Tom describes, the customer is left frustrated and dis-empowered.

This reminded me, that to my delight, of an airborne public service that has responded well to demands for transparency to ease the nuisance it causes to the general public, and it is the good old Metropolitan Police helicopters. There was a time where I would lie in bed, unable to sleep because of the loud whirring sound of the police helicopter overhead - it sometimes felt like living through an episode of M*A*S*H (or an army base in a warzone, to you youngsters). I would go on to Twitter to vent my frustrations and see if anyone was suffering a similar disturbance, but more importantly to find out why the police needed to use helicopters over Islington for what felt like "every night." I would just search the words "Islington" or "police helicopter" and would quickly be talking to (well tweeting at) many people who were suffering from the same disturbance. I quickly found out that I wasn't alone. A third of the complaints about the police helicopters in London were coming from Islington (that might say more something about us as a borough though...). Blog posts and discussions would start to appear on local sites, political parties also took up the cause, a King's Cross neighbourhood site brought up the topic in an interview with the Islington Borough Commander. The Islington Gazette picked up the story.

Discussion between local residents about the police helicopter noise on www.islingtonpeople.co.uk

Finally, a blog post on the Islington People site directed people with concerns to the new @MPSinthesky Twitter account. This was great news. Finally, someone answering our call to be kept out of the dark about these night time visitors from above. The Islington Gazette then reported that this simple measure had considerably and suddenly reduced the number of complaints about the helicopter coming from Islington residents. I love the police sergent's comments in the Gazette's story:

"Sgt Brandon said he was reluctant to adopt the scheme initially. “To be honest it was not my first choice. I am not from the Twitter generation and I don’t really understand it. But we ran out of excuses and we have been blown away by the overwhelmingly positive response.”

See - this service design theory stuff is quite common sense really - just listen to what people are saying and give them the information that they are asking for so that their experience of your 'service' is improved.

Tom also touches on A&E departments. My recent experience of the NHS is that whilst a very good level of care is generally provided, the communication about and administration of the process is very poor. You do not always know why you need to wait for hours, or even how long your wait is likely to be and what is happened next.

I had an operation that I had been waiting a year for cancelled by UCLH in December. It had taken me a lot of effort to fit this operation in with my schedule and to arrange for my parents to come and care for me once discharged. The last minute news of this cancellation was quite upsetting. But if the person telephoning me had told me that my operation was moved because of someone with a more urgent condition (i.e. cancer) needing treatment before the Christmas break, I would have been a lot more understanding. I think we are all fairly reasonable human beings once we are treated like reasonable human beings, rather than passive subjects, and we are kept in the loop.

My other big current gripe with poor levels of customer services are residential block managing agents. Most people who own a flat in London are leaseholders and hold very little power decide what happens to the communal areas of their property, but are regularly landed with the large bill to pay for what is happening (or even in some cases, even what is not). The freeholder for our small block uses a managing agent to look after her responsibilities of insuring and maintaining communal parts of the building. Every year we get issued with bills that are very difficult to interpret, asking for large amounts of money to cover items that we are not always familiar with, and for rises in the service charges / management fees of up to 40%. When these bills arrive, they only remind me of all of the repair tasks that the managing agents have failed to perform during the eight years I have lived in the flat, and we enter into a period of debate. This year, I am querying a £970 repairs bill (I only recall one carpet rip being repaired in the year and numbers being added to the front door), and the introduction of a new annual circa £500 health and safety report charge (the communal area is a small stair case with two lights).

However, if they just took the time to set out the bill in a user friendly design, and explain the (genuine and understandable) reasons for the increases, repairs spend or new charges to us in plain English; give us a copy of the Health and Safety report and show us what value this is providing us; show us that they did go to some effort to get us the best buildings insurance price on offer; (and actually conducted all of the outstanding repairs...) this annual to-and-fro that probably is the majority of work their management fee pays for, would be avoided. Most of us don't mind paying for things if we are: a) understanding of the reasons why we must pay; b) feel that the service we are getting is worth the price we pay; and c) feel that we have some level of control over what we pay for. In a leaseholder set up, this is very often not the case. (Note - we can't get a Right to Manage arrangement in our block because of ground floor commercial property - but any recommendations of good Managing Agents in London gratefully received - they seem impossible to find and many of the online review sites seem to be infiltrated by the false reviews.)

One final note of caution. Informing people of what you are doing is not always going to win you their approval, particularly if they do not feel that what you are doing is reasonable. I remember listening to a talk by Ben Page of IPSOS Mori when I was a councillor about how councils improve their reputation ratings by communicating to people about what they do. This is true, of course, to an extent - people do like to know what they are paying for. However, you can bang on all you like about an unpopular or poorly performing service, but this alone is unlikely to gain people's support. You still need to involve, engage, and work with service users, so you can understand what it is like to really live in their shoes, experiencing your services, from their perspective. Being kept in the dark might be the reason why they are dissatisfied, but you won't find out if there is more to it until you really, and I mean really, listen to them.

Can we join in? Some thoughts on taking women who love women seriously, for International Women's Day.

I have a bit of anger inside me. Anger about the rubbish that women who are attracted to women (choose your own label) are still facing today. Yes - we've come a long way in the journey towards equal rights. Who thought we would ever see a white, male, heterosexual Conservative Prime Minister pledging his support for equal marriage? (Well - it did take a bit of work from the Lib Dem Equalities minister, Lynne Featherstone, to get him there.) But same sex attraction still isn't accepted or acceptable to everyone, and today, on International Women's Day, I want to highlight how this can play out for women who chose to be with a woman rather than with a man.

Whilst gay men (and women) still face a range of prejudice, abuse and even horrific violence (some friends of mine were attacked by a gang with a metal bar in Holloway a couple of years ago) for rejecting the traditional role of a heterosexual man, gay women can also face a reaction that is more subtle: it is mixed up with sexism and misogyny (it may even be rooted in sexism and misogyny rather than homophobia), it doesn't always meet with outrage, but it can still be very damaging and may be why women  who love women are one of the most invisible groups of people in our society, even today.

The story about Jane Hill coming out in The Sun:
 http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/2789609/BBC-newsgirl-Im-a-lesbian.html

Our lovely friends at the tabloid newspapers are not well known for their respectful way of reporting women's lives, but I was particularly shocked at some of the language used in news stories when BBC newsreader, Jane Hill, (a friend of mine from the British American Project) came out two years ago. The Sun reported the story by referring to her as "Busty Jane" (as if she were a page three girl, or worse) and leading with the sub heading that the news would stun her male fans. And then, more recently, when Chris Huhne MP left his wife for another woman, the newspapers filled up with headlines about the "bi"sexuality of his new partner. This report in the Daily Mail went to great lengths to report on details such as her stereotypically lesbian features: "boyish cropped, spiky haircut and love of Dr Marten boots and jeans." Wait - an attractive woman who has "rejected" men, a boyish woman who used to be with a woman and is now with a man. Confusing times in the life of a tabloid journalist. Better make the best out of it by regaining control of the situation and focussing on women as sexual objects that are only valid in relation to men and only judged by their appearance.

Women from all backgrounds often suffer from low self-esteem, and with gay women this sometimes leads to them denying who they really are. They see women getting by in the workplace by flirting with men. Women often face a struggle to succeed in a man's world, without rejecting their stereotypical role even further through the "ultimate rejection of men". Luckily work in an environment where this sort of behaviour does not occur. But the extreme reactions of men to same sex attraction between women are still ever present in inner London. It is not unusual for men to shout excitedly from their van at a woman kissing her girlfriend in the streets of Islington or for men on the streets of Soho to leer at women enjoying an intimate moment by shouting: "Can we join in?" Funny? To be expected? Or disempowering, humiliating and hurtful? Is this act harmful to their masculinity? Imagine that happening to a straight couple. I'd be interested to see their reaction. Although I'm guessing straight women can probably sympathise - most of them have walked past a group of sexist builders in their time - most of them have also been reduced to sexual objects by men they have never met.

Even some gay men are guilty of not taking gay women seriously. Maybe the misogyny expressed by some (but by no means all) of my gay male friends is coming from a different place to straight men. They don't like the idea of being sexual with a women in the same way that a straight man doesn't like the idea of being sexual with a man, and we all know what behaviour that can provoke. But reactions like "lesbians are disgusting", "yuk", "they are so ugly"  or even just laughing at the term "lesbian" are powerfully oppressive to a group of women who often suffer, individually and collectively, from low self esteem, and should be receiving support from their gay male counterparts in the battle against homophobia and gender role conformity.

All of these reactions towards women make me angry because they are an attempt to control women and to achieve this by denying us. Jane Czyzselska talks about the invisibility of lesbians in the media in her article for the Guardian's Comment is Free. But there is an invisibility of gay women in many other areas of life, even on the gay scene (there is only one lesbian club in central London, compared to dozens of clubs for gay men.) Explicit homophobia is horrific, but at least you know it is wrong and you know how to fight back. Homophobia mixed up with sexism can result in people not taking women who love women seriously. The Queen Victoria anecdote is familiar, but illustrative of this hidden malignancy. It is hard to take yourself seriously and your accept yourself if others (gay men included) do not.

My Living Social Summer

Sites like Groupon have been getting a bit of a bad press recently. Today, my mother told me about this article in the Guardian that highlights negative Groupon experiences and, a few months ago, my colleague passed on this article about the risk that merchants are taking they use the site to sell deals. My ethical conscience now feels a little sad.

I started using Living Social in the spring of this year. I liked the idea of very generous, cut price offers that get Londoners out of the house and spending money in a different part of town, especially during a period of economic gloom where the temptation can be to sit tight at home and save those pennies. I signed up to Living Social after seeing that a friend had advertised on Facebook that he had purchased a massage (see, the viral advertising works - you get a free deal if three of your friends also purchase it). I do a like my spa treatments, but find £60 a little bit steep on a regular basis, so paying approximately £28 appealed. I was actually quite relieved when the merchant cancelled the deal due to a lack of capacity, as I was struggling to fit an appointment into my busy schedule. But then I was on their mailing list and my Living Social summer began....

My next offer was a haircut in Chalk Farm. Women's haircuts aren't cheap in inner London, so I jumped at the chance of saving some cash, even if it meant journeying to a new neighbourhood, rather than the hairdressers on my street.  I felt a little guilty not paying the full whack, but I tipped well, and it was nice to see a different part of London.

I then got into the swing of it and joined Groupon and Keynoir too. Over the summer I purchased a cut price Time Out subscription; a few more hair cuts in different parts of town; a beauty treatment or two; a photography lesson; some Zumba exercise classes; a life coaching and nutritionist session; three home cleaning visits; some ready meals; an artisan Nudo food set; some wine; meals at various restaurants; tickets to see the Pirates exhibition at the Docklands museum; afternoon tea; an Ocado order with a year's worth of free delivery; and a vegetarian Spanish cookery class that I attended today.

The best experiences were, on the whole, the restaurants. I did cheat a bit and purchase offers at places I already knew were good, like Islington favourite's Frederick's (a catch up with Andrew) and Public House (my brother's birthday treat). But I also got introduced to great new places, like Dolcetto, the lovely Italian in Chapel Market (a much needed chat with Rachel), and Axis at One Aldwych (James's belated birthday present).  I bought a lovely spa day and afternoon tea at the Park Lane Hilton for my mum's mother's day present (a bargain at £89 for both of us) - the treatments (a hot stone massage and pedicure) were top quality, and the chocolate afternoon tea with fizz was amazing. The haircut at Atherton Cox was impressive. A sports masseurs gave me some good advice about managing my RSI by warming up the muscles in my arm. The chilli salsa and spaghetti in the Nudo set were delicious.  It has been great to have a cleaner session to call on when I am falling behind with the housework. The cookery class was energising, as was the Zumba. And my day out at the Docklands Museum with Ali, 9, and Adam, 7, (both children of different Islington Liberal Democrat councillors) was one I will not forget in a hurry. 

And the worst? One of my manicure and pedicure sessions was not, shall we say, at the most high class salon, and I didn't really feel very pampered at the end of it. I wasn't hugely impressed by the nutritionist - I wanted advice on how to improve my vegetarian diet, rather than on abandoning it. The photography lesson made me a lot more scared of my DSLR camera. The "Chef Prepared Healthy Meals" weren't exactly what I was expecting, arriving in sachets with a sell by date of Sept 2012 - I assumed that they would be nice, fresh ready meals (although to be fair, I didn't read the description on the website). And one hair cut and colour, that I travelled across London for, resulted in a very protracted appointment where the young man applying the colour appeared not to know how to deal with my roots and then the whole process had to be repeated under the supervision of one of his other colleagues.

Saying this, it has been mentally refreshing to travel to new parts of London. Holland Park was a lovely venue for the photography class. Travelling on the DLR to the Docklands Museum was fun. Park Royal was... more of a trek to get to this morning in the fog, but it got me up and out on a Sunday morning.  

After purchasing so many of these offers, I can see that some have been more though through than others. Ocado's free delivery is a good hook to get you using their site, and they require you sign up to an automatic renewal of the (pay for) delivery pass, that can be cancelled. The restaurants benefit from the extra spend on drinks and The Docklands Museum has generated a new fan. But I'm really not sure what is in it for the places that aren't going to show you a great service. The offers are not usually conditional on you buying anything else, so surely the only way that businesses are really going to benefit is by impressing you so that you become a regular customer. I'm clearly not going to trek half the way across London to get my haircut by a lousy hairdresser when I have lots of good hairdressers on my doorstep. The other losers sit at the other end of the spectrum and are the very expensive establishments. I'm buying some services through these offers that are amazing, but I would not otherwise be able to afford them and therefore I'm not going to be going back for more any time soon.

Living Social and the like do sometimes feel like the closest thing to a free lunch, as the discounts are substantial. But you need to keep track of all of your offers - I'm sure a lot of the money is made when the vouchers expire, laying forgotten in someone's inbox.  At one point I got overwhelmed and I had to write them all out on a sheet with expiry dates next to them.  I prefer the upmarket Keynoir (the offers seem well selected) and the mainstream Living Social (the site and their emails are well designed) over Groupon. But that's just a personal thing. 

And will I continue using them? I actually have a few more offers left to use, but I'm slowing down at the moment because I have very few free evenings or days left before Christmas. What started as something to fill a social diary that had more space in it than when I was a councillor, has turned into another thing I'm struggling to fit into my life. And although it is nice to save pennies (well lots of pounds actually), I'm someone who likes to think about the implications of where I spend my money - so maybe in future I will avoid the faff of printing out vouchers and long trips across town and return to my lovely local hairdressers and pay £30 more for a cut (they need to cover their costs and pay their staff, and much needed taxes, after all..). Or maybe I won't be able to resist the temptation of another bargain. But my hope is that good retailers will get wise and come up with a better way of marketing themselves to new customers that fits in better with my "I'm okay, you're okay" philosophy on life. 

We Were Here

This post has been in draft format in my mind since watching We Were Here at the London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival at the beginning of April. I'm publishing it tonight because of a text message that I received yesterday from my friend telling me that he has been re-admitted to hospital with HIV related illnesses - something you don't hear of happening that much these days.

We Were Here is a documentary film about the start of the AIDS epidemic in San Francisco. It is a series of moving interviews with five people (four gay men and a lesbian) who lived in the San Francisco gay community in the early 80s and who lived to tell the tale. The point of this film is to remember those (the majority of that community?) who didn't. The footage of young handsome men, who had only just won the battle of gay liberation, having their confidence and happiness smashed by an unknown disease is heartbreaking to watch, and that era seems like distant history now. (Click here to watch the trailer that gives you a powerful introduction to the film.)

Untitled by Askalon

I first joined the "gay community" as university student in Southampton in 1996. AIDS was still a very important part of this community. I remember the World AIDS Day events we held and the safer sex health workers who were always very prominent in the Magnum nightclub.

This period in time - the mid 1990s - was a real turning point in the history of HIV and AIDS, but I don't know if we knew it back then. I remember at the time wondering what would happen to my friends and to the community in the coming years. Safer sex messages had made a real impact, but we didn't know how long it would take for medicine to produce that long hoped for cure. Films like Philadelphia had recently been released, portraying Andrew Beckett (played by Tom Hanks) becoming very ill (with visible KS marks on his face) and ultimately dying from AIDS related conditions. But in 1999, Queer as Folk was screened on Channel 4, and I don't recall HIV featuring strongly in that story about the gay men living it up in Manchester. It was like HIV had suddenly became invisible again.

If you are familiar with the history of this horrible virus will know what happened to cause this change. Effective drug therapies - antiretrovirals (or HAARTs) - were introduced in 1995. Whilst these drugs are no cure for HIV - the virus cannot be permanently eliminated from the body yet - antiretrovirals mean that for many people the disease can become manageable, some now compare it to a condition like diabetes. But what did this change mean for the gay community? In the 80s and early 90s the signs of AIDS were very visible and so many were lost to this disease. These days seeing gaunt young men on the gay scene has became a rarer occurrence, but HIV has not gone away.

These statistics from the Health Protection Agency and similar ones from Avert show two things. The number of annual HIV diagnoses in the UK has increased dramatically since the year 2000. And people are still dying from HIV. Since 1998 the number of HIV related deaths has remained at around 400-500 per year, compared to 1,700 in 1995. The drop has not been as big as I had imagined.

In the controversial French novel, Hate: A Romance by Tristan Garcia, published this year in the UK, the changing significance of AIDS as a cause to the gay community over time is explored through the relationship of love and then hate between Dominique Rossi and the younger William Miller. Dominique has lived through the AIDS crisis in the 1980s and has seen it ruin the party that the gay community had been having in Paris throughout the 1970s. As Garcia wrote: "There it was. Five years later it was part of the culture. AIDS was there. [...] People died, people protested, people protected themselves, people gave money, people did research. It was part of life, part of the era, part of the whole."

We only have this generation of campaigners to thank for the medical advances that actually took place and saved so many lives. Books like And the Band Played On document the resistance that campaigners faced from the US government under Reagan.  However, Garcia is right that AIDS, as devastating as it was, became a uniting force for the gay community and his character William Miller takes an extreme approach to filling the vacuum that the cause of AIDS had left behind after the changes in the 1990s.  After William's relationship with Dominique ends, William starts advocating "bare-backing" or sex without a condom, complaining that gay safer sex campaigners are oppressing him in the same way that the state is by trying to remove the "special gift" of AIDS from the community and by dictating how gay men should have sex. Perhaps this is a very twisted way of expressing the need to retain a purpose gained from difference and from a cause.

Garcia describes the journey that Dominique is so proud of and that William (the man who came of age in the 1990s) is trying to destroy: "Dominique, who sketched the meaning of his struggle and the long march accomplished by the gay community, paradoxically saw its victory as it dilution, its integration into society: 'The community has sometimes been ungrateful to its key supporters, because their success has brought about a progressive assimilation into the social body. Personally, I consider that an achievement. There are so many things that we don't have to fight for nowadays.'"

I see this tension today in the gay marriage debate. Many people like the title "civil partnerships" because of its difference, because they are resisting that total assimilation into heterosexual society. Others feel that we will not be totally equal until our legal unions are given the same name as heterosexuals', because this implies that civil partnerships are second rate and not as real as marriages.

Is our goal to break free from being a separate community with its own bars, clubs and meetings (do these meetings take place any more?), for the "default assumption of heterosexuality" in social situations to disappear? Or do we like that difference, the special network that is created by the being a member of the LGBT community (the name and membership keeps expanding...). Whilst I would miss the family, and perhaps exclusive, element of the community if it ever disappeared, losing it would be a price that I would be prepared to pay for the end of homophobia, shame and self hatred that ruin so many lives and relationships still, today, in 2011. If we are honest, more of us want to be accepted than excluded. But I don't believe it is ultimately an "either/ or" outcome.

So have we forgotten about the AIDS crisis? Have we forgotten the generation that won the battle for gay liberation and then faced a very unexpected war against a deadly disease that some of their most vile homophobic opponents could have only dreamt of? Do we realise that many people who are diagnosed with HIV today are still too uncomfortable to speak openly about their condition to everyone? And that many people, like my friend, are still in a lot of pain and discomfort because of the infection or the side effects of their medicines?

Here's a link to a very moving post about We Were Here by a man who watched it in the Castro in San Francisco and has captured some of the emotions that many of us felt when watching the film.

Uncovering a lost blog

Inspired by the late Andrew Reeves, who sadly died suddenly last week, I am reviving my blog.

I briefly wrote a blog during and about my time in New York last summer, but this blog was limited to information about that trip. However, over the last week I have been touched and moved by reading the many blog posts about Andrew and his impact on other people's lives. I also frequently have an idea for a personal blog post, but don't usually take it further than jotting down the idea in the "Notes" application on my iPhone. This is mainly because I spend my working day on my laptop and suffer from repetitive strain injury in my right hand (gained from working long hours writing Work Programme bids over the Christmas period) so spending more time in the evening typing is not always an appealing thought.

So today I sat down and decided it had to be done. I briefly thought about whether to use Wordpress or Posterous, but decided to stick with blogger.com as I like the simplicity and contrast with Wordpress which I use at work (and Andrew used blogger.com too).  Then I came to choose a name for the blog and found that lucywatt.blogspot.com was gone already! I felt as annoyed as I had when finding out that @lucywatt was already taken on Twitter (I'm @lucy_watt) - there can't be another me! I decided to look at the blog to see what she had been writing about and discovered that this blog had, in fact, been started by me back in 2005 - in my pre-Facebook days as a way to share (very poor quality) photographs that I had taken on my mobile phones of the 2005 elections, and after that of my holiday to Naples and Ischia (unexpectedly travelling on my own as my travelling companion had lost his passport). Looking back at them, I seem to recall that in those old days we had to use a separate site (Hello?) to load the photographs to the blog.

Whilst initially embarrassed at the poor use of the blog, it made me realise how much things have changed in the last six years. Social media is now an integral part of all of our lives. I found out about Andrew's death from a post on my friend's Facebook page. Over the last week, many memories of Andrew were shared on Facebook and Twitter. Andrew's online presence had brought him closer to many of us who read his blog, Twitter and Facebook posts on a regular basis.  On the day of his death he was even trending on Twitter in the UK, a real testament to the esteem he was held in by online community.

So I now hope that this blog is something that I can make better use of. Reading through my list of blog ideas, I'm looking forward to getting stuck in.

Man reading outside hotel 

Outside hotel 

Religious clothes store 

Dark alleyway / road